THE WILD DUCK: PRESS RESPONSES Almeida (2018) Ibsen in a new adaptation created by Robert Icke www.roberticke.com TIME OUT Andrzej Lukowski ★★★★★ Almeida wunderkind Robert Icke strikes gold again with this moving and clever take on Ibsen Totemic Almeida associate Robert Icke is such a ludicrously and consistently good director that I sometimes find myself wearily bracing for the brilliance of his shows. Trotting slowly through the white male canon, in productions rarely shy of three hours, it can all sound a bit like taking your theatrical medicine. But in practice, it’s almost always extraordinary. ‘The Wild Duck’ is a sort of upper mid-tier Ibsen play which Icke’s new version manages to simultaneously deconstruct, make more intimate, and vastly expand upon. As Kevin Harvey’s Gregory Woods wanders on to the Almeida’s bare, brightly lit stage, he casually – almost smirkingly – informs us that ‘The Wild Duck’ is a play written by Henrik Ibsen in 1885, and that there is no point in a British audience expecting a ‘true’ version of something originally written in Norwegian – but that there is a truth buried under all this. For the 90-minute first half he slowly builds up a picture of James Ekdal (Edward Hogg): essentially a failure in life, but blessed by the loving and tolerant family of his wife Gina (Lyndsey Marshal, a picture of guilt-wracked compassion) and 12-year-old daughter Hedwig (on press night Clara Reed excellent as a smart child who fatally can’t quite understand the adult world). Plus there’s his oddball father Francis (Nicholas Farrell, enjoyably fruity), who spends his time living and hunting in the eccentric ‘forest’ he has built in the attic. Their fates are entwined with those of the Woods: patriarch Charles (Nicholas Day) is a hugely wealthy businessman who has served as patron to James, apparently over guilt about something that happened when he was a business partner to Francis. And his son Gregory, an estranged childhood friend of James, has rebelled against his father’s perceived rapaciousness and taken to aggressively trying to inform anyone who’ll listen of ‘the truth’ about him. A huge part of Icke’s talent is as a writer and being able to adapt stiff-but-important classical texts into empathetic, tender work in modern English. The first half is a frequently beautiful account of flawed human beings trying to keep their shit together under desperate circumstances (while also vocally dissecting the allegorical significance of the wild duck Francis has in his attic). It’s extremely well anchored by Edward Hogg’s weak, caring, bad-postured James: a vanity-free performance shockingly different to his matinee idol-ish turn in the Open Air Theatre’s ‘As You Like It’ this summer. It all kicks off in the gutwrenching second half, in which the house of cards Icke and Ibsen have so exquisitely built up begins to topple. It is extremely moving, as these basically decent people’s lives start imploding. But it is also gratifyingly and unabashedly cerebral, explicitly turning into a thesis on the nature of truth: the truth in theatre, the truth about Ibsen, and above all the emotional truth that can exist upon a foundation of lies. Without ever quite spelling it out, Icke’s ‘Duck’ also feels like it has something pointed to say about the contemporary outrage culture: Harvey’s well-meaning but incredibly damaged Gregory feels like a very recognisable figure to anybody who spends much time on social media, a man who believes his take on the truth is so important that he’s lost all sense of basic human empathy. Toss in across-the-board great performances, a nifty soundtrack, a deceptively simple set from Bunny Christie with one tremendous surprise, and an actual live duck and Robert Icke has only gone and done it again – another classic not so much ‘updated’ as fully realised for our times. *** THE OBSERVER Susannah Clapp ★★★★ Ah, Robert Icke and his theatrical revelations! They are double-pronged. He brings to his staging of established plays such paraphernalia – ideological and physical. Video screens, explanatory commentaries, 21st-century psyches prowling around ancient or 19th-century dramas. Yet he dismantles linguistic clutter, irradiates the heart of a drama. His production of The Wild Duck, Ibsen’s 1884 play about (well partly about) what it is to declare the truth, begins not with the action of the play but with statements about the action. Kevin Harvey as Gregory, an unreliable narrator, segues straight from an announcement about switching off mobile phones into the pronouncement via a microphone that there is no such thing as a “real version” of this play (that would be in Danish Norwegian), then sets the scene (fractured families, dark secrets), points to parallels between Ibsen’s life and his plot (he had a child with a servant) – and starts to unravel its themes. Harvey delivers all this with such an intriguing combination of edginess and ease that I wanted to stay – while also wanting to yell: what about metaphor? What about letting me make my own mind up? But gradually the complicated mechanics – including the use of mics – fade away and the action takes over, shorn of candelabra and several minor parts, and the clarity of exposition pays off as it fuses with Ibsen’s ambiguous, twisting plot: Lyndsey Marshal gleams sinuously as the person who is the incarnation of a lie – and of a good life. Things turn in on themselves and undercut themselves: what is declared should not be believed. This is, after all, a drama motored not only by speech but by sight. Two characters are going blind, and their blindness becomes a dreadful clue to a secret. Photography, the business of one family, becomes a way of thinking about how we frame our lives. It affords a beautiful passage in Icke’s adaptation – he is a writer worth reading as well as an essential director – which talks of the beauty of an image that “creeps” out of blackness (as you might think a character swims through lies), gradually gaining depth and focus, finally crystallising into a scene. It is a luminous account of what happens in the course of this arresting evening. *** EVENING STANDARD Fiona Mountford ★★★★ Robert Icke must rue the fact that theatre awards don’t follow the lead of the Oscars and include the category of Best Adapted (Screen)Play. This trailblazing director would have won it several times by now, and he’d win it again this year for his stripped-down, spruced-up take on Ibsen’s 1884 classic about the brutality of truth-telling. We start very far from 19th-century Norway. The house lights are up, the stage is bare and the actors are in modern dress. There’s some initial toying with the idea of a “real version” of this work and when the drama gets going, the characters occasionally speak into a microphone to give us their interior monologues and comment on the veracity (or otherwise) of what they’ve just said in the dialogue. The lights dim and the production slips gradually into naturalism, but what Icke does throughout is cut to the heart of the emotional matter. Long-buried secrets and lies fester within and between the Ekdal and Woods families, and Icke, with his concentration on a less hierarchical and therefore more delicately nuanced set of relationships than in Ibsen’s original, hones in on the fragile domestic equilibrium between James (Edward Hogg) and Gina Ekdal (Lyndsey Marshal). Their 13- year-old daughter Hedwig (Clara Reed) dotes on the titular waterfowl they keep in the attic, a rather heavy-handed allegory for the general emotional murkiness. There’s particularly lovely work from Marshal; Gina’s every emotion registers with a flinch, a shadow across Marshal’s expressive face. Icke’s triumphant march through the theatrical canon continues. *** FINANCIAL TIMES Matt Trueman ★★★★ The truth comes out and worlds fall apart in The Wild Duck. Henrik Ibsen’s family drama shines a light on a sham marriage. James and Gina Ekdal’s happy family home is gradually exposed as a construct; a convenient cover-up for another man’s infidelities and an illegitimate child, Hedwig. Pulling the play into the present day, Robert Icke brilliantly retools its naturalism for our post- truth age. It is a Plato’s Cave of a play. Kevin Harvey’s Gregory Woods (Gregers Werle in the original) returns from a self-imposed ascetic exile, rejecting his father’s industrial wealth, as a determined truther. By contrast, his old schoolmate James (Edward Hogg) lives a fantasy life. A childish daydreamer in lopsided specs, he plays mime tennis with his daughter and puts his photography practice aside for some pipe-dream invention. It’s his wife (Lyndsey Marshal) who holds their life together, fully aware that it’s founded on a fiction — all arranged and paid for by her ex-lover, Charles Woods. “The truth will set them free,” insists Gregory, like some enlightened, deranged doorstep evangelist. It doesn’t. Icke illuminates Ibsen’s intentions with form. Starting on an altogether bare stage, exposed beneath unblinking floodlights and fluorescents, he slowly builds a fully-fleshed fictional setting. Actors who begin by directly addressing their audience, microphone in hand to narrate events, gradually slip into naturalistic pretence as Bunny Christie’s design builds the Ekdal house around them and Elliot Griggs’s lighting dims down to soft shadows. It’s super smart: a show that slides from Brechtian alienation to Stanislavskian suspension of disbelief. Mimed objects materialise as the play unfolds.